There's a list that I keep on my desk. It's not one piece of paper but a stack of post-it notes that I'm constantly adding to. It's become two piles because now I'm working on development of two games, Heavy Gear Blitz and Jovian Wars. The purpose of these list is to ensure that passing comments by players on the forums and messages to me do not get forgotten along with my own epiphanies and thoughts. There are rules comments and then there are rules observations. Questions about how the rules work and what their purpose is and that's where the concept of priority comes in.

The Gilgamesh Command Tank for Utopia is a model that has been in development for a long time. Originally there were a number of ideas starting as a regular tank, though slightly larger than normal to a kind of super Hittite, a kind of Armored Fighting Vehicle for the south, to a massive hover N-KIDU factory.

The design for the vehicle was always to be a command node for a N-KIDU based Utopian army. The idea was that a large tank could have a powerful communications system to coordinate a very large number of drones at one time. Originally the concept was more of an armored train pulling factory cars but that was discarded early both as a logistical problem for the rules as well as a nightmare for the cost of producing such a model. Read on for some thoughts about decisions we made regarding this centerpiece model.

It is finally here! The October 2017 Living Rule Book update (Beta) for Heavy Gear Blitz! Download it here.

Last week I posted a blog post with some teasers to sections of the update and received a lot of feedback. about it, some good but mostly bad. This is great! The only way feedback works is if it is brutally honest.

I had the fortune of taking my vacation this year in Nova Scotia and we visited a beach near New Glasgow, a small fishing community on the Northumberland Strait. While we were enjoying ourselves I took a mental map of the space so I could draw it up as a map for a game of Heavy Gear in the future.

The result was an interesting map that provides some interesting tactical choices.

Casting hundred of pieces this week for the Jovian Wars Kickstarter resin models I was reflecting on how some models started off as a clear design archetypes and yet became even better as the player suggestions really ramped up.

For anyone not in the know, DP9 had a kickstarter for our new game, Jovian Wars, and it was awesome. 143 great backers raised over $25000 to unlock a whole new generation of ship models and remaster all the older Jovian Chronicles ship models in resin. Add in new bases for better stability and to make measuring, firing arcs, and turning easier and we have an exciting new game. The rules as well have received a lot of attention. Today I'm going to look at one of the remastered models for the CEGA faction, the Uller.

today's post is going to be partly a discussion about how rules changes in one part of a miniature game rule set can have effects on other parts, and I want to look at how game balance is affected by rules changes. Specifically the different levels of rules changes there can be. Since there will be another Heavy Gear kickstarter in the Third quarter of 2017 we'll be issuing a rules update for the living rule book so this becomes very relevant right now.

The items that will be updated are being compiled as a list now. What the update amounts to is some points changes, a couple of stat changes, and some of the additional rules (Transport) being clarified and some new model rules being added for models that will be revealed for the kickstarter.

I've been a war gamer since it was synonymous with role playing games and there almost no division between game types as there is now. Then there was a great revolution where plastic models became available that were designed as playing pieces and not just for modeling. There were companies who had been casting figures in metal for years, mostly historical figures. Almost within a decade the landscape had changed and suddenly dozens of companies were publishing games of all types.

The table top gaming industry is going through a number of revolutions right now that are a natural extension of those early days. The first is price point. The days of mass battle games being the standard are largely gone, replaced with skirmish games. Portability and price point are large selling features, almost as important as a compelling backstory. More than ever today collaboration is the key. Collaboration in the gaming industry used to mean one or two game designers working together with a particular sculptor. Now with the internet the meaning and scope of collaboration has changed and it changes everything.

Because there is a slight delay in getting out the most recent Jovian Wars update with the newest data cards I have decided that we should release the new data card images so that the Kick Starter backers can see what they are ordering ASAP.

Now that the first Jovian Wars Kick Starter is over the development work turns back to Heavy Gear Blitz!

Going forward this will be the pattern where we here in Dream pod 9 work on the prep for kick starters, work on the kick starter and then work on fulfilling the kickstarter while preparing for the next kickstarter. The next kick starter for Dream Pod 9 will be the next three factions for Heavy Gear Blitz.